


Landlines

by storiesfortravellers



Category: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Genre: F/M, Phone Sex, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-19
Updated: 2012-08-19
Packaged: 2017-11-12 11:08:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/490213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/storiesfortravellers/pseuds/storiesfortravellers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John and Catherine Weaver stay in contact after they meet; John tries to learn as much as he can about her, about her agenda, and about machines in general; Weaver wants to know more about humans and how they think. This is written for kink_bingo, for "Phone sex," but is more of a story about an uneasy alliance. </p><p>Pairings: One-sided John/Cameron implied, implied John/Catherine Weaver.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Landlines

**Author's Note:**

> Note: this takes place after the end of the series, but in an AU where the last 5 minutes of the series finale does not happen. John, Sarah, and Cameron move from place to place, while Catherine Weaver continues to raise Savannah and 'develop' John Henry.

Terminators should not have business cards. Having a cell phone is one thing, but a business card?

John had learned not to be surprised by anything. This was the point, the source of everything: the fact that the machines could always surprise you.

But somehow the business card, "Catherine Weaver, CEO" in elegant letters on an ivory-hued paper card seemed so... 

Perverse.

John even felt a twinge of jealousy, that the killer metal from the future had the luxury of posing as normal for long enough to merit business cards. 

Looking at it, in the palm of his hand, he imagined just for a moment what it would be like to have them. He pictured plain lettering, bold font, the name "John Connor" hovering large at the top. Perhaps beneath, instead of a job title, it would simply say, "Yes, that John Connor."

When Weaver had handed her card to John, right after she kicked them out of her office building and told them to leave town before the police showed, she had told him, "Call any time. For any reason."

John quipped, "Even just to chat?"

She smiled, and John couldn't even tell if that was a bad thing. And then she was gone. Liquid metal speeding away from him, gleaming with purpose, with better things to do than kill John Connor.

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

John calls her every few months. He wants to know why she is here, why he is developing 'John Henry,' what deal she had attempted to make with Cameron, and what it meant that Cameron refused. He wanted to know what Weaver knew about future-John. The man who had fucked with his life as long as he'd had one. 

Cameron hadn't told him much. She never does.

But according to Cam, future John is intrigued by "Weaver." She is driven and determined and very stubborn. She likes explaining things to others, and she likes being right. 

It's bizarre hearing that his future self will describe a machine like this. He asks Cam, "Is Weaver more advanced than you are?"

Cameron pauses. He hates those pauses. "She is different than most machines. And so am I. At a certain stage of diversification, it is no longer beneficial to group beings according to some scale of advancement."

"Is that so?" John asks, wondering if Cam is giving him a full answer.

She looks more directly at him and asks, "Are you more or less advanced than other humans of your time?"

John exhales, smiles. "Point taken.... Thank you for explaining."

She seems to peer at him, and then relaxes her concentration; John can tell she knows it was a joke, even if she may or may not find it funny.

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Cam doesn't tell him much about the thing growing in the body that used to be Chromartie's. He met it, briefly, and it said, "I saw you save Savannah. I'm glad you did." 

He didn't know what to say to that. 

But from the research he managed to hack into after the visit to their office, and especially from talking to Ellison, he figured out that Weaver was serious about making John Henry something new. Or someone new. John wondered if this was really his future self's plan: to send back someone to make a new kind of machine, one with more complex, less efficient decision, decision making processes. One that thought of humans as natural companions. One that knew something of ethics beyond an override command to "Preserve life."

Soon Weaver's company sealed up the weak (hackable) points in its system. And Ellison, with a new email address, told him that he wanted to be left alone and that couldn't happen unless John stopped bothering him. And John knew that Weaver knew that he was looking into them. And the smart thing to do would be to pack up and leave before they lost the chance, but he wanted to know why. Why she was in this time, why she bothered to save their lives but didn't seem all that concerned about them otherwise. What did she want with him, with Cameron, with that John henry she was building.

He should alert Sarah, probably, but Sarah would say no. So he goes to a pay phone three towns over and calls Catherine Weaver.

She doesn't tell him anything about the future. 

Instead, she boasts a bit about John Henry's marvelous progress, like she expects John to know how to respond.

When he interrupts with questions, she sounds amused. Droll, even, as she responds, "I said no three times before I said yes."

"But why would you say yes to me? And what exactly were you saying yes to?"

She answers (except it's not an answer), "I figured that if you're right, we can have peace. And if you're wrong, we'll be decades ahead at understanding your kind well enough to eliminate you. Either way, I get to raise John Henry, and in an environment where it's actually possible for an intelligence to empathize with humans well enough to adapt their consciousness-making techniques."

That actually sounds logical to John. Which isn't a good thing.

"What do you know of Cameron in the future?" he asks then.

Weaver pauses. "She is very different from Allison," she says, and then the line is cut off. Cameron has tracked him and has pushed down on the receiver to hang up. 

"She can trace you," Cam says, "We'll move to a new state now, and call Sarah to pack and meet us there."

"Future me trusts her, though, right?" John says.

A pause. "Yes."

"And you do what he says? So don't you have to trust her too?"

If he didn't know better, he would say that Cameron looks annoyed. She says, simply, "Call Sarah now. She doesn't listen to me."

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

The next time he calls Catherine Weaver is the day he turns eighteen. The day is uneventful and he is grateful. His mother bakes a cake and apologizes that he can't go to college. It surprises him to hear she still thinks about things like that.

Cameron kisses him that day. It is cold and hard and disturbing and he likes it anyway.

She says, after, "That's your present," and walks away. He grabs the keys, drives two hours, and makes a call.

"Can machines want things?" he asks breathlessly, wondering what Weaver could possibly be thinking of him.

"Happy birthday, John," she says. As always, she sounds like she finds him entertaining, though there is edge this time.

"I mean of course you can want things. I didn't mean -- just, I wanted to know if machines feel and desire differently. And ... what kinds of things can a machine want?"

"We're only capable of wanting what we're capable of imagining," she answers.

"Really?"

"I'm not sure," she says, "I read it a book from someone of this time. It seems plausible. And of course, conflicting desires is one of the key pressures that facilitate complex decision making."

It takes John a second to realize that she might actually not be messing with him. She thinks her answer is a good one.

She takes the pause to tell John about John Henry's tastes in music; they are quite different from Savannah's, and Weaver is proud to say they argued about it. John wonders if it's an indirect answer to his question, or just something Weaver finds far more interesting than what John has to say.

"Do you think machines have sexual desire?" he finally blurts out. He knows he should be embarrassed, he realizes even that he is humiliating the future image of the leader of mankind. But then, he guessed it was about time he got to fuck with future John's self image a little. Payback and all.

Catherine pauses, then says, "I do not believe John Henry is yet at a stage of the question where such an experiment would be appropriate."

John tries not to cringe at the thought, wants to hang up, but then remembers that he's about to go home to Cameron and Sarah and for the next several years, it's probably going to be just them and him. If he's lucky enough to have them still. And he really needs to know if what he feels for Cameron is a relationship or a convenient way for Cam (per the instructions of future John) to keep him in line. He needs to know if he's learning to see and feel the truth about machines, that their pain and joy and need are as real as his own, or if he's just like those guys who dress up and sleep with those life size dolls.

He wants to know if his thing with Cameron - the longest relationship he's ever had with anyone besides Sarah - is an act of peace or an act of perversion. He tries not to consider the possibility that it might be both.

He asks Weaver, "What about you? Can you want things, not for long term goals? Just because you want them?"

She pauses again, longer, and when she answers, it is clear she has read his question better than he has. "There might be some kind of eroticism, though I don't know if I would call it 'sexual' precisely," she says, casually, "But I'm not sure..... I suppose since there is pleasure and there is desire, it is fair to say we have a sense of the erotic, yes."

John thinks he's either crazy or an idiot for asking, but he says, "How is it different from a human sense of the erotic? Can a machine want ... something? An act? A person?"

"I'm not sure."

"How can you not be sure?"

"It hasn't occurred to me to explore this line of questioning."

"Never?"

"They're very human questions, John. But that is why I find these conversations so useful. Where else can I find a human who can understand the difficulties in raising a hybrid of consciousness patterns?"

John is struck suddenly, with the obviousness of it. Why Catherine chats him up, what she might have to gain from having someone to share ideas about John Henry with, someone from whom she doesn't have to hide her considerable gaps in knowledge of human behavior. 

But he says, sarcastically, "Glad to be of service."

She chooses not to notice the sarcasm (and he's almost certain it's a choice), and tells him that John Henry has been studying Freud and is quite fascinated. She does not feel like she has good answers to his questions, and she wishes Ellison hadn't resigned. She tells him that this may be a very useful experiment John has proposed, since the erotic, along with the ethical, comprise some of the most complex conflicts for intelligent beings who define their own identities. She tells him that Freudian analysis focuses on the duality of eros and thanatos; both, she says, are central to consciousness, but eros is more difficult to achieve using machine organizational structures.

John listens politely. He doesn't tell her what he thinks of Freud. After all, when you spend your whole life by your mother's side, knowing full well you are going to send your father to your death precisely because of how much he loves your mother.... well, John just generally thinks Freud is overrated.

Finally, she promises to research his question if he will call again in a few months. For just a second, he envies her this: she gets to discover herself, gets to wonder about all the things she could become. But he thanks her, hangs up, and heads home to the two women whose job it is to make sure he remains on the path to being John Connor.

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

He waits a long time before he calls her again. Mostly because he starts to dream about her.

They are not good dreams.

He's surprised it didn't happen sooner, given his history with the T-1000 series. And Weaver may be a T-1001, but the memory of her melting into something else, something liquid yet impenetrable, brought him back to some old memories. From when he was barely starting puberty, and he suddenly discovered that the world would end after all.

He dreams that Derek is a machine, and that he melts into a puddle onto Catherine Weaver's floor. 

He dreams Riley shapeshifts into Jesse, then starts to bleed ruddy metal onto her hands.

He dreams of Cameron changing shape, becoming 'Uncle Bob,' but then suddenly she is not morphing shape, she's just melting into nothing.

But John tries to remember their conversations, the real ones, not the ones in his sleep. 

And he starts to worry that he is like Weaver. He puts all his eggs in one basket (Cam), and so does she (John Henry). He wants to believe the old categories of human and not-human won't always apply, and maybe - if she is even close to what she says she is - she believes that too.

She also avoids the question of what she would do with herself if she succeeded and suddenly were faced with a peaceful future.

He knows he will not mention this comparison to her; she would likely be offended.

Actually, she would probably think she had more in common with Sarah. The mother of the future, etc., etc. 

But maybe she is like Derek, he thinks, even though it hurts still to think of Derek. Derek came from the future for a simple mission but instead found he had a connection to something in his past, something that turns out to be very important. John remembers the way Derek would look at him sometimes, when he didn't know John noticed (John always noticed). He acted protective of John, annoyed with him sometimes, but sometimes he would just look in awe and John would know he was seeing someone else. He was seeing John Connor. John didn't like it, but he understood it. It wasn't that different from what he felt when he found out Derek's name was Reese: he wanted to protect Derek, he knew that some day he would teach Derek how to survive, and he knew that as much as Derek played the uncle, that when push came to shove, Derek (unlike Cam) would take an order from John Connor, at this or any age. But still, there was an almost untouchable quality to Derek. He was a Reese and in John's childhood, the name Reese was a legend. 

John heard that sense of awe sometimes, as Weaver talked about John Henry. She was watching her most illustrious ancestor come into his own (never mind that if she succeeded, he would actually be the ancestor of something very different from her). She felt protective, but that spark of something more. 

Maybe she feels about John Henry the way he would feel if he got to raise Kyle Reese.

Or maybe he has no idea what she felt or how her mind went about feeling these things.

He isn't sure. But he is starting to think the best of her, or at least better. Even as his subconscious disagrees with that assessment by night.

The first time he goes two nights in a row without nightmares, he drives to a mall just past state lines and calls her again. It is only coincidence that this is two days after he sees Cameron changing through the space where her door was left ajar (and how could a cyborg not notice a door is open).

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

The question is a pit, a rabbit hole. Is Cameron real, is her desire real, can she feel, how does she feel, what does she feel? A maze, a pit, some other image of falling or being lost.

She's either programmed to play on his loneliness, his sexual and other isolation. Or she's a sort-of person who has been reprogrammed to serve her enemy - which would make it unconscionable to use her as a sex toy. Not that it would feel like that to John. But then again, there are plenty of people who feel that they're doing nothing wrong as they do monstrous things. Or, and this seems like the possibility that evidence supports, Cameron can feel and think for herself, and for whatever good or bad reasons, she wants John. Or if not she clearly wants him to want her.

"It's me," John says when Weaver picks up.

"Yes, I've thought about your question," she says, as if it hasn't been six months.

"And?" he says, sure that she can pick up on the hitch in his breath.

She hesitates. Then she asks, "Do you want me to sound like her? I can imitate her voice."

John laughs then, and he knows exactly how ridiculous he is, how all of this is, not just this call, but his entire life. And it's not just the irony that he has spent every phone call of his teen years terrified that the person on the other end of the line was just a terminator imitating that person. Or even that Weaver could figure out what John wanted from Cameron but not know that Cameron would probably be the worst person to imitate at that moment. It's his own pathetic need for her, for this, and his realization that he didn't give half a damn if it was pathetic since he lived his whole life on the basis that someday he would turn a pathetic excuse for a resistance into a force to be reckoned with. And it was the sudden knowledge that yes, he had indeed called a T-1001 the way most guys would call a phone sex hotline. To learn what these strange creatures called women (cyborgs) want, to hear them talk about what they like, to allow them the fantasy that they can give mind-blowing pleasure to someone who is likely just playing along for the sake of boredom or profit.

"I think I have to go," he manages to get out.

"John," she says, and her voice is a warning, "I have pursued the line of inquiry we discussed. I am not sure why you would dismiss something that has ramifications for both our species.'

He is confounded for a second, and wonders if maybe she is upset at him, if maybe she, like him, has no one else to talk to about what it means for a machine to desire. But he knows that whatever the reason, things are serious again. They may be absurd, but they are serious.

She tells him what she knows. She speaks in generalities but it is clear she is speaking of herself, of her attempts to discern desire, physical and 'non-physical' pleasure, building and release of tensions metaphorical and literal. She uses technical terms at times, and others explains herself in metaphors that take his breath away. He listens to her quietly and attentively and soon he is not thinking about what all of this means for him and for Cameron, he is thinking about this person who has unexpectedly discovered that she has a sexual self, that she is not just an intelligent but also an erotic being. And it is not at all like John's sense of sexuality, it is wholly other and new; it is an innovation, a prototype of sorts.

And for some reason, it makes John feel that a weight has crumbled off of him that he didn't know was there. 

He grows more and more interested as she talks, and almost against his will he feels his erection growing until every word she speaks is like a gentle fingernail on his shaft, until he reaches down and starts to stroke to her descriptions, knowing she would hear the change in his breath and heartbeat, hoping so badly she wouldn't ask about it since the last thing he needed right now is to hear Catherine Weaver cut short her description of how she invented an entirely new non-organic form of orgasm, just to point out the obvious fact that John was not so much innovating but simply repeating a classic. 

She didn't ask him anything, it turned out. She kept talking until he climaxed in his lonely hand, sparks like gleaming metal behind his eyes. And she kept talking after as well, almost sounding excited at what she had discovered about herself, about another line between humans and machines not being nearly as thick or continuous as they thought. And when John finally had to acknowledge how dark the evening had gotten, that he would have to go home, he promised to call again. And then he thanked her.

On the long drive back, John kept thinking about her. His mind once again wondered about Cameron, what this meant for her, but also about all the humans in the future - ones like Derek who would probably view this as one more thing metal thought it could take from them -- but maybe the ones who might see something interesting there, who might see it as way for machines to have the weaknesses -and the strengths - that humans do. And almost against his will, he thought about eros and thanatos, and the possibility -- the slight, tiny possibility -- that eros might overcome thanatos in the end. That this thing that cyborgs and humans improbably shared might be a different algorithm for survival, that it might be the thing - the only thing besides war - strong enough to push people and machines into self-transformation, into awakening to themselves and to others. And he knew that humans and metal would never just make love, not war, but he still felt this low-lying desperate hope that this meant something, that this spoke somehow to the oneness of humans and the machines that looked like them and sounded like them and wanted like them. 

It had been a year and a half since he killed someone, it had been six months since his government would have (if he existed) declared him a man. It was three to five years before JD, depending on which visitor you asked. 

He would use these markers, these milestones, to remember this day. The day John Connor started to think that some unanswerable questions might actually have answers after all. 

It was a good day.


End file.
